Last week St. Mike launched an interactive campus tour in a slightly different format. St. Mike launched their tour completely through YouTube. The creator of the tour, Mallory Wood, was recently interviewed by collegewebeditor. What is really interesting from the post is Mallory’s insistence on crediting Seth Odell with the idea on his blog almost a year ago.
Mallory also goes on to share in the article that a driving focus of her tour was recruitment based.
“First of all, we wanted to provide prospective students a way to “visit” our campus from their home. The campus visit is an important part of the recruitment process, but before a student decides to visit a college they will most likely check out the website. I want to give prospects an authentic taste of what our campus is like during their initial search…”
This interactive campus tour was accomplished through YouTube’s linking to other videos from their player. This linking functionality is not brand new. It was almost two years ago that TechCrunch first broke the news around this new functionality. This is simply one of many innovative uses of the feature. It’s also a great example of enabling some functionality that is used in ways probably never dreamed of by the creator.
I’m sure this won’t be the only YouTube interactive campus tour, but it will be interesting to see if this becomes a regular distribution channel or not. Realistically, any school that has short videos associated with locations around their campus could easily turn it into a YouTube tour with some additional video editing. Hmm, I wonder if there is a way that nuCloud can do that programmatically for you? I can absolutely see the value of reusing existing content for this new channel. I also think that it can go both ways. If you are building a tour and have the video first, why not leverage YouTube to distribute the content while you build the rest of your tour or map?
As a final shout out, you might recognize Seth’s name for his most recent project, HigherEdLive. HigherEdLive is a Sunday night web show where he brings on guests from the higher ed web community to tackle subjects. Just this past Sunday I joined Seth on the show to talk about “Going Viral With YouTube.”